Finding myself forced to stay at home with time on my hands does have its upsides.
I’ve been doing stuff on blender at a real rate of knots and this is my latest Project.
I’m building a castle, hopefully for the Unity and unreal Engine game Engines, so I’m having to be a little disciplined in the way that I build it. (normally because I tend to be quite messy with my geometry)This is built out of tile parts, and as you can see it can be used to put it together a fairly quick Castle. So this is after about 2 days of work. the geometry is still fairly simple but the main part of it was getting all of the bits to fit together Theoretically you could build any sort of Castle out of this.
As I go on I’ll be adding things like the keep, and the great hall, and some kind of the ground, with paving and cobbles, at least for the curtain wall interior.
These are the basic components.
As you can see you can build a castle pretty quickly out of this.
The next thing I want to do is to build the interior of some of the buildings, particularly The Gatehouse and the round Towers so that anybody who is taking a character through the castle is able to reach places without having to go through loading screens. it does of course make the project somewhat more challenging.
This is The Gatehouse which I’m working on currently. As you can see in the corner there’s already a set of steps, and I’ve put the windows. in The player character will be able to climb the steps into the room above the portcullis or onto the next floor in order to reach the Castle walls. you will also be able to go up onto the roof. I have divided the floors into seperate objects to make working on them more maneagable.
These are the steps going up to the portcullis room on the lower part of the gate Tower
I’m also going to be making up my own textures on this project. I have the Good Fortune to live in Salisbury, which has a large number of mediaeval buildings so there are plenty of textures that are going to be appropriate for a castle (although there isn’t actually a castle, just a ruin in Old Sarum).
I’ll be doing the windows entirely as textures onto a plane with no geometry. the Castle walls will be taken from a photo of the cathedral Close wall, there is a church window at st. Thomas’s and a smaller window at the New Inn on New Street. The odd one out here is the roof tile texture which was actually taken from the Farm House Museum at Ballenberg in Switzerland These are some of the textures derived from the original photos.
and this is a render of the room above the portcullis in The Gatehouse after the textures have been applied.
Close Wall
Window St Thomases
Roof at Ballenberg
These are some of the textures derived fom the photos above.
I have nearly finished the gatehouse, this is a picture of the roof section.
And this is the room on the second floor of the gatehouse complete with St Thomase’ s windows
The Gatehouse interior is mostly done. Here is a video of a walkthrough from bottom to top.
1 Like
Textures are done very well. Walls seem to be a bit thin for the type of structure, though. Unsupported stone staircase, especially the stone railing on it, is probably the biggest thing taking away from the realism for me though.
Textures are done very well. Walls seem to be a bit thin for the type of structure, though. Unsupported stone staircase, especially the stone railing on it, is probably the biggest thing taking away from the realism for me though.
thanks for the comments. The staircases were indeed completely wrong, and I think you’ll see that in the new video I’ve fixed them. As far as the walls are concerned, I am designing these particular buildings as game assets the trick here will be to make the walls appear to be thick even if they are not (having the interior space as large as possible will help with the collision)
I have increased the thickness of the walls. around doors and entrance ways to create the illusion of thick walls .
Here are are a couple more pictures showing the current state of the castle plus another video I have a feeling that the curtain wall is got too big and I’m going to have to make the whole thing smaller, otherwise I’ve made a rod for my own back.It’ll be interesting to see now how quickly I can change the building having hopefully finished all the tile parts at least for the wall. I will be adding bevels to the edges of the battlements because they look unnaturally sharp at the moment, but I have discovered to my cost that if I apply bevels too early it becomes very difficult to fix any problems that I’ve had with the texturing, and it has taken me absolute ages to match up the seperate tiles, so I really don’t want to do it again.
[/quote]
This has rather split into two projects. The one that has taken precedence for now is finishing a promotional video for the current set of music tracks, and the wall that I constructed has ended up surrounding a small hilltop town rather than a castle. I shall concentrate on getting this finished over the next few days, and then go back to the castle afterwards.These are some screenshots of what is still a work in progress. It rather reminds me of the time when I used to mod Oblivion.
Well the video is done, and I have to say this all rather went off on a tangent, (such is life). I will come back to finishing the castle after I’ve spent a few days promoting the video. Of course the video itself is promoting the music, which is hopefully going up as part of a package on the Unity asset store (soon I hope). I’ll also be posting the video separately in the finished projects section as its own piece, as well as the Swiss fighter mini zeppelin that appears in it. Confused? I certainly am 
